V-Tigger: I'd say that your success with Saim-Hann is 85% due to your own skill, and 15% due to the list being so bizarre that most people don't know what to do against it at first.

I played Saim-Hann for years, and it is easily one of the *weakest* 40K lists in the game. I'd say that only a very few lists, like Catachan-codex Jungle Fighters when not in Jungle Terrain, are worse.

The list you posted was extremely suboptimal, even for Saim-Hann, leading me to believe what I said at the start: your success had nothing to do with your list, and everything to do with your skillz, and the unfamiliarity of your opponents with what your guys could do

Well, thanks for the compliment, but I can't honestly say that it has NOTHING to do with the list. The value of having a completely mobile army (every unit being able to potentially move 24" in a single turn), is that YOU determine where the fight happens.

I agree that you have to be a good general to use Saim-Hann effectively, but once you have them down, they are nearly impossible to defeat because no other army will ever be as mobile.

Also, I know the Saim-Hann armies you are thinking of (All Vypers) and this army would easily rip it to shreds.

Damn, all this talk about the new Eldar and Saim-Hann makes me wish my army could magically reassemble itself ... Oh well... 1 model at a time...

"It can't be an underpowered list if someone can win consistently with it!"

I *did* win consistently with mine. I went +19=4-6 with what was an intentionally sub-optimal Saim-Hann list, and even rather decisively won tournaments with it.

Saim-Hann CAN do well, but they are an extremely fragile, very very finicky list. They start certain missions at a huge inherent disadvantage, and do progressively worse on smaller tables and in bigger games with higher point values.

Ultimately, the reason I call it "underpowered" is because there are times when you literally do everything right with the thing, have all the dice rolling above average, and you still lose. Compared to something as forgiving and durable as Space Marines (the Gold Standard of 40K army list "power"), Saim-Hann simply can't compare.

Here's a simple comparison, by the way. I also played Biel-Tan Eldar. My Biel-Tan had an 82% win percentage (folding tie games into the mix as a "half" win). My Saim-Hann just 72%. Over the past six years, based on the details from my Scorecard, I have an average 77% win percentage. In other words, I'm a pretty good player, and my Saim-Hann consistently perform WORSE than my average results, whereas my Biel-Tan (a much more powerful Eldar list) consistently perform BETTER than my average results.

Among all my 40K armies, my Saim-Hann did better only than my vanilla Imperial Guard, and that's at least partly because I've never used the exact same list for my IG from game to game (that is to say, I never spent years specializing and streamlining and perfecting a specific list -- I was always trying completely new things with the IG).

The one IG list that I *did* spend tweaking and using repeatedly in tournaments (51 games in nearly 2 years), I had a 78% win percentage win, just above average.

Granted, it's not a huge sample. But from my own personal experience, from my understanding of the game mechanics of 40K, from my knowledge of the Saim-Hann list and its capabilities and weaknesses, I'm fairly comfortable saying that the Saim-Hann are one of the weakest lists in 40K. They are hard to win with, they simply will not do as well as other lists tweaked and refined to the same degree, and they will "crap out" and lose for no apparent reason more frequently than virtually any other list in the game.

Of course, this is all academic because with the new Eldar Codex, the point values will be completely different, and as a result, Saim-Hann may end up being much better, or actually even worse ( ), than before.

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V-Tigger -- no, I'm not thinking all-Vypers. All-Vypers is pure cheese, but it's even more vulnerable in 4th edition than it was in 3rd edition.

Personally, I've wanted to do a Farsight Army of Doom for a while now (Farsight + 7 Fireknife Bodyguards, all with shield drones and at least one of those fail safe thingies so enemies can't sweeping advance after you). I just like the idea of a huge point sink that can still kick butt if used carefully.